


The Walls Come Tumbling Down

by SegaBarrett



Category: Chess - Rice/Ulvaeus/Andersson
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28634985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Anatoly has new options after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Relationships: Anatoly Sergievsky/Florence Vassy, Anatoly Sergievsky/Svetlana Sergievsky
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2021





	The Walls Come Tumbling Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [athousandwinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Chess, and I make no money from this.

Anatoly watched the Berlin Wall come down from the little TV in the apartment he shared with Svetlana and their daughters.

He didn’t know quite how to feel at first. After all, loss had been the continual ebbing emotion that had coursed through him since the moment he had decided to return to Moscow (and, more importantly, leave Florence behind), and this felt like a loss of some kind as well.

Any future was always much more terrifying than the past, after all, even if the past had never been quite that great.

The future was uncertain, and ever the chess player, Anatoly was not fond of uncertainty, needing to plan his moves an entire game in advance.

The crumbling of the wall, the hammers, the cheering, all set him a little bit on edge.

After all, it was only this that was keeping him and Florence apart. Without a reason, he would be faced with a choice. And every choice that Anatoly made seemed to always be wrong, seemed to always lead him into a checkmate of his very own.

He turned off the TV and spoke to Svetlana if he had not seen it; as if neither had just seen it at the same time.

“What should we have for dinner tonight?”

It seemed as if they had the same thing for dinner every night, and there had been a calmness to that before Florence had come into his life. Now, he had trouble reminding himself not to think of things that could not be.

But the news on the television…

The tearing down of the Wall, the collapse of the regular, of the mundane, suddenly split that all open. 

The impossible was now possible all over again, and it was terrifying. 

“Some borscht, perhaps,” Svetlana replied.

Because of course she knew, too.

***

It took six hours before Svetlana said something, but of course she said something. Sometimes Anatoly was guilty of behaving as if Svetlana didn’t known his mind just as much as he knew his own. They had lived together long enough that she could read him like a newspaper – that was the way things had had to be, sometimes, and not only in the Soviet Union. No matter where you were in the world, it was important to be able to know exactly who you could trust. And sometimes, that was nobody at all.  
What she said was, “So, when are you leaving?”

“Leaving?” Anatoly echoed. “Where would I be going? The girls have school and you and I, we have…”

“We don’t have anything but obligation these days, Anatoly,” Svetlana replied, letting out a sigh, “And that’s the way that it has been for some time.” He opened his mouth, probably to quibble with that pronouncement, but she put up her hand. “Whatever you owed to me, whatever you may have owed to me… That is in the past. If you go, then I have a chance to be happy now, too. Maybe you should owe me that.”

“Where would you go?” Anatoly inquired. He did not ask who she would be with when she went wherever that was, but that was the underlying question, after all. Who would his wife become? And could he let go of her again, as he had let go when he had looked in Florence’s eyes at the Merano Mountain Inn so many years ago?  
“I wouldn’t go anywhere,” Svetlana replied, “I would stay here with the girls.”

“And when they move away?”

“Then I will stay here by myself, Anatoly. I am not a lonely woman.”

Anatoly hesitated. 

“You need to go,” Svetlana told him again, “Go, before fate makes us both have to change our minds. Leave in the night, and then… don’t come back if it doesn’t work out. I am not here to be your silver medal or your consolation prize, Anatoly. Finally, I am here to live.”

***

The flight was eighteen hours in all, with one layover in Helsinki where Anatoly barely had enough time to attempt to figure out whether he had a taste for the prime delicacies of Finland (and were they delicacies at all if they were sold at stands in the airport?).

By the time he landed in New York, he was groggy and tired and feeling as if there was a large possibility of it all being simply a dream. Perhaps he was still back in Moscow, or perhaps he had simply switched to another mirror-image Soviet-style apartment, like in the movie “Irony of Fate” that they would watch every New Year’s back home.

He hadn’t called Florence to tell her that he was coming. Perhaps she wasn’t even alive – dangers could befall people anywhere, if Anatoly knew anything after all. But he had hope, even if he shouldn’t.

When he deplaned, he went straight to the airline’s desk and asked the woman if she could help him make a call. And she did.

***

Anatoly found a hotel in the Bronx, a neighborhood he had never heard of before. In fact, he had never heard of most of them before and had assumed that New York City was just only big sprawling Manhattan, but his mind seemed to repeat the same few landmarks he had seen pictures of over and over again like wallpaper. 

When he checked into the hotel, the receptionist smiled at the sound of his name.

“There’s someone waiting here for you, you know,” she said. 

“Where?” Anatoly inquired, leaning in as if the receptionist had the visitor hidden behind her back like a bouquet.

The receptionist chuckled.

“Turn around,” she instructed, and Anatoly did, turning slowly and then finding himself staring at Florence Vassy. He wouldn’t have been able to tell that she was years older if he didn’t already know, because her eyes had the same glitter over all the pain.

He hoped that his eyes did, too. Now that he saw her, they would have to – he would accept nothing less.

And she was the one holding a bouquet, after all, a dozen lilies each arranged perfectly. He wanted to lean in and smell them and he wanted to ask her where she had been and what she had been up to all these years.

And he wanted to ask what, at last, they were going to do now. What they were going to do about them.

But he knew that those answers might not be easy ones – not at first, at least.

So for the moment, he settled for wrapping his arms around her and breathing in the scent. Of Florence, of the flowers.

Of the future.


End file.
